Before We Leave on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Before We Leave is a city building game set in a cozy corner of the universe. Nurture your Peeps and their surroundings while rebuilding and rediscovering civilisation. Settle new lands and planets while avoiding hungry Space Whales.
Before We Leave is a city builder, casual and economy game
developed by Balancing Monkey Games
and published by Team17.
Released on May 13th 2021 is available on Windows and MacOS
in 10 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Turkish and Japanese.
It has received 1,637 reviews of which 1,283 were positive and 354 were negative resulting in a rating of 7.5 out of 10. 😊
The game is currently priced at 4.49€ on Steam with a 75% discount, but you can find it for 0.47€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified Before We Leave into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 (64 bit only)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-4300U or AMD Phenom II X4 975
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti or AMD Radeon HD 4890
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 2 GB available space
MacOS
- OS: OSX 10.14.2 Mojave (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i5 3.0GHz, 21.5
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: 2 GB RAM
- Storage: 2 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Different scenarios and the ability to change difficulty levels keeps the replay high.
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Before We Leave is overall an okay city builder, but suffers from a couple of significant issues. 1: The game appears to be horribly unoptimized and requires a significantly better computer than it should need to run. It straight up did not run on my old computer and causes excessive heating on my current one, which is a gaming laptop. 2: The game is very repetitive, forcing you to build up the exact same infrastructure on every planet you visit with no variation besides the different biomes. 3: The shipping UI is horribly designed and needs to be completely redone. The developers decided to be extremely lazy and used the same UI with the same import/export settings for both sea and space shipping. Combined with only being able to create a single spaceport per planet this results in serious issues, such as items that need to be exported to another planet not being exported if those items also need to be imported from a different island. A great example of how bad the shipping system is are two islands I have that generated two tiles apart. The UI treats them as a single island, yet I am unable to build a bridge between them. Trying to transport resources between the two “combined” islands is extremely tedious and requires excessive micromanagement due to the UI not supporting exporting and importing from the same island.
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It's definitely a casual builder, but the resource management between islands/planets can be a lot to manage. Overall I played a lot when it was on game pass, and just picked it up for 5 bucks on sale, and it's easily worth the sale price.
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Even after playing for hours I still do not understand a lot of things, like how are my peeps keep consuming clothes too fast. Are they eating them?
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TLDR: A peaceful colony management game that doesn’t put its best foot forward, seeming tedious, but improves in the mid and late game. General Thoughts/Overview: Before We Leave (BWL) is an extremely gentle colony management game. You lead your ‘peeps’ as you emerge from an underground shelter used to hide from an unspecified disaster on the planet’s surface. Rebuild society, rediscover technology, and reclaim the stars as you learn from the past and try to do better than the ancients who fled below ground. There are no real hostile entities, at least in my play through, though there ARE antagonists you need to work to overcome, but the biggest difficulty is fighting the midgame lull. Pros: [*] Super peaceful and gentle. This is a very relaxing game to play. [*] BWL is also extremely stripped back. Most of what you need to do is simple in nature and the game is quite easy to learn… That said, it was very pleasing to go back and optimise my first world as I was building up my 5th, using everything I had learned along the way. [*] Once you get into the flow, and overcome the initial complexities, BWL gets to shine. I almost gave up on it out of boredom, but once I got through the tough times it became extremely easy to play and addictive. Cons: [*] SO. VERY. DULL . The opening portion of the game, learning to set up the trade routes, making everything work, needing tech, needing to go back to change things around as your tech improves… UGH. It’s so tedious and mind numbing. There’s no real stakes so there’s no real challenge… Until the planet starts getting eaten by space whales… which sounds like the worst lie, but isn’t. [*] The gameplay loop has been too oversimplified in many places, making it often unsatisfying to play through, until you are far enough along to have everything running smoothly, then it’s the joy of expanding. [*] BWL dumps a huge amount of info on you at the very start, and does a very poor job of teaching you how to optimise or remind you of things. It also doesn’t present information to you in great ways, doubling down on the tedium as you have to eyeball everything. Suggested improvements: [*] The biggest QoL improvements I can see would be the game tracking if you do multiple steps in a row towards something which can be done easily. For example, it was as I was writing my notes for improvements I wanted to point out that the road improvements would be much more pleasant if you didn’t need 3-4 clicks per tile… then it hit me to check the interface and low and behold, there was an easier way. If the game went “oh hey, you’re doing this super inefficient thing, there’s an easier way…” that would be great. [*] Another useful QoL improvement would be if I only had to set export limits, and warehouses would auto fill their stocks, instead of me needing to set import/export quantities on every island. My cement factory is happily sat idle from the bajilion cement it can make because I didn’t notice I forgot to add it to the import tab? Frustrating. I built the damned hub so it would export to fill the spaces in warehouses all over the solar system, I dislike having to tell every port to import it, and it clutters the screen needlessly. [*] Make everything matter more. Bad clothes? Gloom? Only potatoes? Who cares? Seriously, who cares? It literally doesn’t matter at any point after the first couple of islands. The only consequence is slowed production… once you have two sources that’s irrelevant. There is no downside to peeps being unhappy, make me care. Overall Recommendation: This is a real tough one. For the vast majority of my playtime I’d have given BWL the thumbs down… There are very clear reasons why only around half of players reached a new island, a quarter reached a new planet, a tenth met a whale, a twentieth made it to the rim or core, and only half of them finished the game… But now? By the end of my play through? I think it has to be a thumbs up, because I’ll be back to play again. Not right away, but some unspecified time in the future when I want a gentle colony builder, I’ll be back… and that in and of itself is essentially a recommendation. So if you like peaceful, simple, and gentle colony management games… then this is for you. I’d say it’s easy enough to be baby’s first colony management experience, but the grinding early game and ridiculous minutia in the most annoying ways possible might put budding colony managers off… As such it does need some experience with the genre to get the best experience from. I do not recommend this game if you’re after a strong story experience, if you want strong challenge, if you want meaningful choices, or if you want something fast paced and pewpew. I definitely don’t recommend this if you’ve not got the patience for a long haul and no eye for detail… but if that’s you I’d be surprised you read a long form review for a genre that probably drives you mental… For me, while much of BWL is left wanting, I enjoyed it once I had everything up and running and could just cook. That combined with my inevitable return, and it gets the old thumbs up. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/44852412/]My curator page with reviews by genre. In case you want to find more games, or even reviews, like this one.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Before We Leave is currently priced at 4.49€ on Steam.
Before We Leave is currently available at a 75% discount. You can purchase it for 4.49€ on Steam.
Before We Leave received 1,283 positive votes out of a total of 1,637 achieving a rating of 7.53.
😊
Before We Leave was developed by Balancing Monkey Games and published by Team17.
Before We Leave is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Before We Leave is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
Before We Leave is not playable on Linux.
Before We Leave is a single-player game.
There is a DLC available for Before We Leave. Explore additional content available for Before We Leave on Steam.
Before We Leave does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Before We Leave does not support Steam Remote Play.
Before We Leave is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Before We Leave.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 08 June 2025 00:35 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 10 June 2025 12:27 |
| Steam price | 14 June 2025 20:27 |
| Steam reviews | 14 June 2025 20:03 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Before We Leave, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Before We Leave
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Before We Leave concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Before We Leave compatibility
Game modes
Features
Online players
29
Developer
Balancing Monkey Games
Publisher
Team17
Release
13 May 2021
Platforms
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